Characterization of the Activation-Relaxation Technique: Recent Results on Models of Amorphous Silicon
ABSTRACTThe activation-relaxation technique (ART) is a method for finding saddle points in high-dimen- sional energy landscapes. ART has already been applied to a wide range of materials including amorphous semiconductors, Lennard-Jones glasses, and proteins. In spite of its successes, a number of fundamental questions remain to be answered regarding the biases associated with its sampling of the saddle points. We present here results of a detailed analysis of the biases in the simulation of amorphous silicon. We focus in particular on the biases of the method in sampling saddle points, the completeness of the sampling and the sensitivity of these quantities to variations of the different parameters.